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The New Food

We'll all be eating weeds (and loving them)

Two decades ago, global high cuisine went into overdrive with foams, fusions, and fireworks. Now that chefs have conquered food chemistry, it's onto the next challenge. (Hint: It's not molecular gastronomy.) Here, a look at how—and what—we might be eating in the next few years.

There won't be any olive oil. "I don't want to have the same pantry as everyone else in the world," says Atlanta chef Linton Hopkins. Instead, he makes his own vinegars using local apple cider and muscadine wine and cooks with lard, peanut oil, cottonseed oil, or other fats. At Copenhagen's Noma, René Redzepi uses only Nordic ingredients, incorporating wild-foraged herbs, berries, and seaweeds, plus rare game like musk ox.

You'll be saying hello to foraging. San Francisco's Daniel Patterson is one of the many chefs turning to the wild to find new ingredients. He works with a botanist to identify edible varieties of plants and regularly goes foraging for native fallow grass, Douglas fir tips, and purslane. In Copenhagen, chef René Redzepi foregoes imported tomatoes and herbs and instead turns to Nordic plants like wood sorrel, axel berry shoots, and bulrushes.

Good-bye, Red Delicious. Perfect lab-engineered produce will lose its luster as chefs introduce consumers to a world of irregularly shaped, sometimes homely ingredients that make up for their appearance with exceptional taste. And not just heirloom apples and tomatoes: Heritage food champions are rescuing everything from grains to cattle. A few to look for: forono beets, said to convert even the most beet averse; Randall Lineback veal, from Berryville, Virginia, with a rosy color and earthy taste; and dragon tongue beans, a rare variety from the Netherlands.

The chef will have his farmer on speed dial (or the chef will be the farmer). Chefs are more committed than ever to micro-sourcing their ingredients. In Napa, Ubuntu chef Jeremy Fox works with horticulturists and farmers to find obscure produce. "The garden is where all the menu ideas start," he says. "We grow ingredients that we've never used before, like mashua from Peru and Bolivia." Chef Michael Anthony, of New York's Gramercy Tavern, loved the carrots in Kyoto so much that he is having a farmer friend cultivate them in the United States. The new Eno, in Durham, North Carolina, has its own farm where chef Marco Shaw and staff tend to the pigs and bees themselves.

Less shock, more awe. Chefs aren't giving up their gastrovacs, but the focus is moving away from tableside pyrotechnics. In Chicago, both Graham Elliot Bowles and Laurent Gras have tapped medical technology to enhance flavors. Bowles says, "It's about using X-rays and CT scans to better understand certain animal structures, employing centrifuges to clarify and separate stocks, and employing different methods of freezing." Gras consults chemists at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital on subjects such as distillation, and has a mixer that can be used to dissolve particles into solution—or to simply make an impossibly velvety sauce.

There won't be any restaurant at all. From pop-up and guerrilla supper clubs to the food truck craze, chefs are moving away from brick-and-mortar restaurants and toward mobile, creative outlets. Kogi BBQ, a collaboration among three restaurant and hospitality vets (their collective résumé includes the Hilton and Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and Le Bernardin in Manhattan), is a fleet of Korean taco trucks that tweet their whereabouts to L.A. food lovers. Co-founder Caroline Shin-Manguera says, "It's important to bring great-quality foods to people who would otherwise never be able to try them." Mobile restos also reinforce communities. "When people are standing in line, they talk to one another," she says. "They become united through food."

Or if there is a restaurant, it'll be more like a gallery. Grant Achatz of Chicago's Alinea and Heston Blumenthal of England's Fat Duck are among the chefs playing with color and sound to enhance dishes. Achatz predicts, "The world's most pioneering restaurants will incorporate crossover elements that might seem theatrical. What if we changed the color of the room or plate, or manipulated sound? It treads the line between really cheesy and potentially profoundly affecting." And Blumenthal has continued experimenting since he introduced "Sound of the Sea," a dish paired with an iPod playing a sound track of waves and seagulls (it originated in an experiment he did at Oxford a few years ago).